By Tim Oren
Chapter 1: Big Potato
This week featured an independent journalist and hidden camera revealing Governor Brad Little calling backers of his opponent Mark Fitzpatrick “racists” or even worse – “Californians”. Less noted was a following segment of the video where a rep from Idaho Potato PAC confessed that 50% of their workers are illegal. They’d be happy to have low paid immigrants work for them year-round, aka amnesty. Let’s look at who and what the Big Potato PAC supports.
As a refresher, here’s my map of the Idaho House votes on illegal immigrant bills in the last session:
The blue points are legislators voting in favor of all four of the relevant bills, the reds are those who voted against all of the measures to monitor and minimally control illegals. Here’s the same map, with campaign contributions from Idaho Potato PAC marked:
The blue dots are those supported by Big Potato, with the large circle being their average position. The red dots are incumbents with challengers funded by Big Potato: Geyer (11B), Caval (24A), Vollmer (25B), Lowman (1B) and Collins (7A). How should you expect those challengers to vote, if elected?
Now for the Senate. There’s no map for the illegals related votes, because Senate Guthrie never let those bills come to the floor. But the territory is much the same:
Big Potato is, of course, supporting Guthrie and Anthon, who enabled dead-ending those bills. Their opposition circle lies on top of the Z-sisters of the Senate, Zito and Zuiderveld. How would their opponents, Blanksma and Reinke, be expected to vote on illegals bills, should they ever see one?
Chapter 2: Big Dairy
Big Potato had to be caught on a hidden camera, but the Idaho Dairyman’s Association proudly goes on record, including testimony in front of a legislative committee, that their workforce is up to 50% illegal. Let’s look at their election proxy, the Idaho Dairy Industry PAC. Here’s the map of their direct contributions to House primary races:
The Dairy PAC is also active in “independent expenditures” – those mailers, signs and ads supposedly uncoordinated with campaigns. While direct contributions (above) are limited to $1,000 per entity, there’s no such limit for independent expenditures. Here’s the map for Big Dairy $$:
Consider the average position of the legislators supported by Big Dairy, and imagine the likely take on illegals by Vollmer (25B) and Caval (24A) were they to be elected. Idaho Dairy PAC is also active in the Senate races:
As with Big Potato, the support list starts with Guthrie. Big Dairy seems to be focusing on Magic Valley, running Reinke against Zuiderveld and Swensen against Kohl. And they’re getting a little help from a friend:
Chapter 3: Idaho Hispanic Political Educational Committee
This one came to my attention via a Xeet from candidate William Mosteller. An organization newly minted at the end of 2025, IHPEC has a website that proclaims “Idaho runs on immigrant labor, Latino families, and common sense… even if some politicians keep pretending otherwise”, but does so after an list focused on the illegals related bills that were stalled in the 2026 session, carefully eliding the ‘illegal’ part of their applicability to immigrants.
I’ve never understood why citizens with Hispanic heritage should want illegals undermining their wages and communities just because they look similar. When you look into the founding document for IHPEC (PDF), things become clearer: The organizers include reps from PODER of Idaho and Community Council of Idaho – it’s the NGO grift, Idaho flavor. Their funders for the primary election include Idaho REALTORS PAC (the one with 90% anonymous donations), Idaho Prosperity Fund (IACI), and a ‘John Evans PAC’ that shares addresses with a D.L. Evans Bank in Burley.
Here are the IHPEC legislative endorsements:
And,of course:
I’m sure they will all be totally independent.
When they tell you who they are, believe them.
Afterword
Another interesting story of this week was the Idaho Statesman having a fainting spell after Jordan Redman openly put $250,000 of his own money into a PAC that – quelle horreur! – supports small government candidates. In my next post, I’ll dig into the web of PACs that the RINOs are using to obfuscate the sources of their funding.
About Tim Oren
Tim Oren retired to Idaho after a 30 year career in Silicon Valley. Here he gardens, home-brews, teaches kids to shoot, and has applied his well-aged statistics degree to subjects such as educational funding and results, Idaho legislative race targeting, and now legislators' voting patterns. He is a contributor to the Idaho Freedom Foundation and a number of Idaho candidates.
